Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus: Our first look

February 25, 2018

Transcript

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The Galaxy S9 and S9+ are here.
They're Samsung's answer to the iPhone 10.
They're beautiful phones and they're all about the camera.
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Both of them do something really novel with a 12 megapixel lens that automatically snaps between two settings.
One that's best for low light and one for all your other shots.
Also the S9 Plus has a bonus lens.
This is Samsung's second phone to include two cameras on the back so you can take those artistic portrait photos.
The S9 on the other hand sticks to just one camera lens.
There's even better slow motion video on here.
It captures video at a rate of 960 frames per second and all that means is that your slow motion videos will stretch time.
You know what they say, slow motion is emotion.
Then there's the eight megapixel front-facing camera, which, in addition to taking selfies, can scan your face to convert it into an animated emoji, called AR Emoji.
This is a clear copy of the iPhone 10's Animoji feature.
Big differences between the Galaxy S9 and the S9 Plus obviously the size, Dual cameras on the back, and the battery for this guy is a little bit bigger.
From the front, the Galaxy S9 phones look almost identical to last year's Galaxy S8s.
They're all screen beauties with very slightly slimmer bezels and enormous screen to body ratios.
You get a headphone jack which is a rarity this days and the return of the button for Samsung pesky voice software.
You have Micro SD card storage and a second speaker to your music and your audio is going to sound a lot louder and richer.
I'm also loving this bold new colors.
Lilac purple and coral blue.
They're beautiful in person and they give the phones an immediate edge over your basic boring black.
But the best change is on the back.
Remember how you had to awkwardly stretch your finger across the camera to unlock the Galaxy S8 and Note 8?
Samsung has sensibly move the fingerprint reader to the center of the back panel beneath the camera and I couldn't be happier.
Well maybe I could be a little bit happier if the reader was built into the display, like on this Vivo phone.
That was one rumor that just didn't pan out for the S9.
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As for unlocking the phones with your face, you won't get a map of infrared dots like you do with the iPhone X but there is a new feature called Intelligent Scan.
It tries to unlock your phone through an iris scan first but it automatically falls back on face unlock if the iris scan fails.
It's meant for speed and convenience.
But Samsung admits that Face Unlock isn't secure, so I really don't see the point of using Face Unlock alone or as part of Intelligent Scan.
If it were me, I would just stick to To the fingerprint and the iris scan.
On the inside, the Galaxy S9 phones are the first to use Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 845 chip, which promises a heap of speed, battery life, and security improvements.
Plus the phone Phones bump up external storage support for 400GB cards.
For software the S9's run on top of the Android 8.0 Oreo, so they're all up-to-date.
There is plenty that the S9 and S9 Plus borrow from last years S8's.
Screen size.
At 5.8 and 6.2 inches, they've got very high resolution display There are three storage options.
They vary by region so you may not have your choice, depending on where you live.
They are also the same battery capacity as last year's models but we're hoping that they'll be even more efficient this year for longer battery life You've got the same water resistance rating at IP68, wireless charging built right in and support for gigabit 4G LTE when those networks are ready.
And now for the million dollar question.
Now that we know everything that's in the Galaxy S9 and S9 plus, how do they actually compare to the iPhone ten, Google Pixel 2 phones, and others?
Well, we don't know yet, but we can't wait to test them out.
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